Radical Documentary and Global Crises

Militant Evidence in the Digital Age

Ryan Watson

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253058003
• eBook ISBN: 9780253058027
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

When independent filmmakers, activists, and amateurs document the struggle for rights, representation, and revolution, they instrumentalize images by advocating for a particular outcome. Ryan Watson calls this "militant evidence."

In Radical Documentary and Global Crises, Watson centers the discussion on extreme conflict, such as the Iraq War, the occupation of Palestine, the war in Syria, mass incarceration in the United States, and child soldier conscription in the Congo. Under these conditions, artists and activists aspire to document, archive, witness, and testify. The result is a set of practices that turn documentary media toward a commitment to feature and privilege the media made by the people living through the terror. This footage is then combined with new digitally archived images, stories, and testimonials to impact specific social and political situations.
 
Radical Documentary and Global Crises re-orients definitions of what a documentary is, how it functions, how it circulates, and how its effect is measured, arguing that militant evidence has the power to expose, to amass, and to adjudicate.

1. Digital Active Witnesses and the Limits of Visible Evidence

RADICAL DOCUMENTARY PRACTICES have two essential, intertwined functions: to prove and to move. These practices must produce and prove facts to viewers for a range of purposes, from creating the state and new ideologies in the aftermath of revolutions to representing an injustice that is worthy of attention. They also have to spark new ways of seeing and experiencing the world in order to move the spectator toward political action. Historically, provoking the viewer in this way involved matters of aesthetics and the affective functions of content and form and was often accomplished with appeals to empathy, shame, anger, and other strong emotions while exciting the eyes, mind, and body with montages and interactive multimedia screening events. But there is also a more instrumental tendency in the radical use of documentary images and sounds where such practices are used to accumulate and deploy visible evidence to persuade targeted audiences and/or official bodies to act based on effective law and policy appeals.

This chapter focuses on the latter function, primarily examining the interventions of human rights–based visible evidence within legal, policy, and governmental realms. While these areas are not normally considered radical and appeals to them could be considered mere reformism, they have both immediate and potentially long-term transformative impacts both inside and beyond official arenas but only when visible evidence operates within the proper frames of reference and networks and ecologies of circulation for targeted audiences. When made and/or used in a targeted way, properly contextualized and accumulated visible evidence can be successfully deployed for radical and activist purposes. Utilized in this way, the images become “militant evidence,” a concept that expands on a long global legacy of radical documentary and possesses the force to catalyze revolutionary changes and movements in the networked digital age.

To explore and explicate one aspect of this concept, how militant evidence is used to generate “effective radicality,” the projects of two organizations working at the intersection of media activism and human rights are analyzed: Brooklyn-based WITNESS, which collaborates with groups across the globe on a range of projects and B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, which partners with Palestinians working to end the occupation on a variety of fronts. In a globalized digital world, both groups have pioneered bringing forth effective radicality by establishing lasting frameworks for the militant evidence produced by digital active witnesses and providing models for justice and accountability inside and outside official venues. Due to the widespread use of cellphones with cameras and other digital recording devices, documentary media can conceivably be produced by anyone. This circumstance fundamentally alters the potential of the witness while blurring the lines between the roles of the amateur, the activist, and the artist. The term digital active witness represents the capacity and vitality of the everyday person, wielding common consumer technologies, to intervene in a radical or activist way. This position of self-representation is not a mode victimhood or appeal to suffering but rather one part of many agentive interventions and contributions to larger collaborative activist efforts.

The digital active witness is any person who purposefully or through circumstance produces militant evidence and then personally or through partnerships shares it to engender accountability in some form in an effort to transform the world around them. The concept of the digital active witness draws on and updates John Durham Peters’s definition of the “active witness,” who is “a privileged possessor and producer of knowledge.”¹ The notion of a producer of knowledge gives voice and force to the witness who captured the media and/or gave personal recorded testimony based on firsthand knowledge. Further, the idea of privilege puts the witness in a position of momentary power, particularly when such evidence comes from witnesses and survivors of war, violent crime, rights abuse, or other situations of extremity. This chapter explores the role of the digital active witness as it emerges from a rich legacy of transnational documentary practices and works in effectively radical ways. Digital active witnesses, in partnership with larger organizations, engender forms of accountability that range from urgent local information sharing and digital archiving in affected communities, to prosecutions in trials for international war crimes.

The digital world of “cameras everywhere” has transformed the standards and expectations for legal persuasion and argument, particularly in human rights cases.² Because these venues for accountability demand verifiable visible evidence, digital active witnesses possess and produce privileged forms of proof. However, as Jay Aronson notes, the recent massive proliferation of documentary-based “visual data” in the human rights world has led to concerns about preservation, archiving, and the ethics of use.³ In addition, digital active witnesses are often in dangerous situations and take a number of risks that must be accounted for, including securing immediate safety while recording and/or avoiding retaliation for having done so. On the one hand, Aronson advocates for a humanistic approach that foregrounds the needs of witnesses and survivors over the demands of laws and archives. On the other, he is mindful of the critical importance of preserving and using relevant visible evidence and other forms of data. Beyond the many risks, access to these avenues for adjudication is precarious and limited, even in the face of clear evidence and especially for minority groups and/or those living amid wars, occupations, mass incarcerations, and human rights abuses. Digital active witnesses thus often depend on partnerships and collaborations to realize the full impact of the militant evidence they have captured or provided.

This balancing act, between the need to adjudicate, archive, and preserve but also partner with and protect witnesses and other survivors is clearly demonstrated in the efforts of WITNESS and B’Tselem. Both groups, in direct collaboration with digital active witnesses, deploy militant evidence through expanded video advocacy, or “transmedia advocacy,” accumulating and circulating documentary media for specific audiences across a host of platforms and ecologies within the context of larger advocacy projects with quantifiable goals. The idea of transmedia advocacy builds on Sasha Costanza-Chock’s notion of transmedia organizing, which is defined as “on the ground, social movement media-making” that is “cross-platform, participatory, and linked to action . . . (within a) broader media ecology” that provides specific frames of legibility and meaning for the accumulated media to circulate within.⁴ Transmedia advocacy encompasses the multiplatform media, legal, and governmental ecologies that WITNESS and B’Tselem operate within as well as the broader ripples of impact beyond wholly quantifiable measures. In addition, the emphasis is not on professional media makers but rather “grassroots, everyday social movement media practices”⁵ or, in this context, digital active witnesses. In transmedia advocacy regarding the realm of human rights, a multifaceted, loosely affiliated but collaborative group of activists, journalists, lawyers, technologists, artists, media makers, and everyday people, intervene in perilous situations across the globe while wielding militant evidence in an instrumental way.

Further, through their practices of transmedia advocacy WITNESS and B’Tselem, in partnership with local digital active witnesses, bring forth effective radicality through their deployment of militant evidence. The concept of effective radicality as an outcome is a potent force, and this power derives from two components. The first is the idea that lasting, meaningful changes with beneficial material effects on everyday people can occur through the targeted use of documentary media within official channels of accountability. These changes would include new laws and policies, legal adjudication, and/or forms of restorative justice and compensation. The second component involves the wider, unofficial generative effects on populations, activist movements, and social, cultural, and legal norms. This chapter, which examines two human rights organizations working at the nexus of law and policy, draws on what Seyla Benhabib calls the “jurisgenerative” effect of human rights claims. This effect defines some of the less immediate or quantifiable effects of transmedia advocacy and the effective radicality generated. In her formulation, the more rights claims made in the public sphere, the more new social actors, particularly those traditionally excluded from public discourse, will be enabled to “develop new vocabularies of public claim-making and to anticipate new forms of justice.” Social actors exercising their right to expression and association, guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), is crucial for “the recognition of individuals as beings who live in a political order.”⁶ Importantly, Benhabib emphasizes a bottom up, citizen-generated approach to rights spurred by the use of communicative technology as a way to assert oneself as a member of the political order with a fundamental right to be heard and become a digital active witness.

In these ways, even when rights claims and other forms of public witnessing and testimony do not lead directly to official forms of justice, they can positively affect future cases by laying the groundwork for the legibility, via digital media, of the claims of previously marginalized voices. Building on Benhabib’s formulation beyond the context of rights and legal justice, the impacts of transmedia advocacy campaigns also have sociogenerative effects, including the efficient dissemination of vital information, the creation of local archives and accountability structures outside of the government and courts, and the benefits of engendering collective forms of resistance for catalyzing future activism and assertions of rights. The jurisgenerative and sociogenerative effects of transmedia advocacy are crucial aspects of the idea and power of effective radicality because they work slowly but persistently to change the norms of law, culture, and society.

For WITNESS and B’Tselem, documentary media is instrumental for transmedia advocacy and engendering effective radicality, as forms of militant evidence are used across legal, governmental, and community settings.⁷ As Leshu Torchin argues, groups like these can go beyond mere “exposure of abuse” by using “strategies to place video within a promotional movement that takes into account multiple factors in order to best direct attention and to produce action.”⁸ Without harnessing the militant evidence and providing the proper frameworks and networks for action and legibility, a single traumatic or graphic moving image can devolve into what Louis Georges-Schwartz calls “image events,” which are defined as “images that must be shown but cannot be properly responded to.”⁹ WITNESS and B’Tselem provide the proper frames of reference so the images captured can be properly responded to. They also help catalyze movements and direct resources into the hands of local groups while building a culture of official rights claims, which produce jurisgenerative and sociogenerative effects beyond their specific quantifiable goals and outcomes. Even when documentation of a human rights crime does not lead to official adjudication, other forms of emerging activism and practices of resistance can generate and galvanize.

To contextualize the analysis of the deployment of militant evidence by WITNESS and B’Tselem, in this chapter, two important turns to evidence within the history of documentary film are assessed. First, the use of film evidence of the Holocaust at the Nuremburg trial in the aftermath of World War II. And second, the wide, constant television exhibition of grainy video of Rodney King being beaten by a group of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers in 1991. The tape was also a key piece of evidence in the trial of the officers the following year. Today, the widespread availability and circulation of similar images, particularly graphic ones, has not radically altered the landscape of human rights abuses, genocides, or police brutality, as all still frequently occur. The Nuremburg trial and the King tape demonstrate that the affective impact of visible evidence, no matter how powerful, does not guarantee successful outcomes in official settings. Rather, often more mundane, yet accumulated, targeted, and deployed images, effectively engender material impacts for survivors and communities.

Beyond these evidentiary flashpoints, the concept of the digital active witness is rooted within a global genealogy of practices, tendencies, and wishes that sought to create engaged and ideologically informed witnesses from the ranks of artists, activists, and amateurs all armed with cameras to “capture facts” to be used in the service of revolutions and demands for social change. These practices, both within the history of the radical or committed documentary and political cinema more generally, are often engaged through questions of aesthetics as a way to trace opposition, in both form and ideology, to dominant structures and modes. Yet, there is an important and often overlooked tendency among radical documentarians of accumulating and instrumentalizing images for specific purposes, relying on the fact of the event as the main currency for manifesting and spreading radical politics and revolutionary ideas within larger, emerging transmedia efforts. This chapter employs an analysis of highlights from this genealogy through an examination of the work and writings of Dziga Vertov in the wake of the Russian Revolution and the emergence of factography after Vertov’s dizzying aesthetic approach fell out of favor; the growth of the Film and Photo League in the United States, whose members adopted some of the Soviet approaches in the 1930s; the work of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas and the development of Third Cinema in Argentina in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the multimedia and direct activist efforts of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and their video advocacy arm, Damned Interfering Video Activist Television (DIVA TV) in the 1980s and 1990s.

These groups and artists are considered in this chapter not for their aesthetic acumen or innovations, which are vast and well documented, but for their commitment to capturing and deploying militant evidence for instrume...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Radical Documentary, Global Crises, and Militant Evidence
• 1. Digital Active Witnesses and the Limits of Visible Evidence
• 2. Prisons, Palestine, and Interactive Documentary
• 3. Amateur Counterarchives in Iraq
• 4. Syria and Abounaddara
• Conclusion: Militant Evidence and the Future of Radical Documentary
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author